Last month the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio accepted auction results submitted by Duke Energy for a one-year supply contract at a clearing price of $50.71/MWh.

Auction results will be blended with future auctions to establish a price for utility customers to compare with competitive options, which they can choose to take. The results come as Ohio utilities have been announcing retirements of older coal-fired plants that are being pressured by cheap natural gas.

Dive Insight:

Winning bidders will remain confidential for three weeks, so it's not yet possible to know which generators won the right to supply capacity in DP&L's auction. But Platts reports the winners in Duke's auction included American Electric Power Service Corp., Exelon Generation and AEP Energy Partners, among others.

For DP&L, its one-year product resulted cleared at an average price of $51.45/MWh, for delivery period June 1, 2017 to May 31, 2018. The two- and three-year products beginning the same date cleared at $50.91/MWh and $48.65MWh, respectively.

Duke held a 16-round auction in March, in which a half dozen competitive suppliers submitted winning bids, resulting in an average clearing price of $50.71/MWh.

Clearing prices in Ohio power auctions have remained relatively steady over the past few years, despite a shift away from older coal-fired generation and the influx of new natural gas plants in the Ohio market.

Ohio has been dealing with how to handle retiring baseload generation for more than a year. In 2016, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission blocked power purchase agreements approved by state regulators that aimed to support aging coal and nuclear plants owned by FirstEnergy and AEP Ohio. A settlement was reached last year on plant retirements for American Electric Power that included job revitalization efforts.